D’oh!
Err yes. Normally I’m like most people, I never seem to get the time to work out what’s for tea days hours minutes before we eat but in the case of dough I’ll make an exception. Only a handful of times in the last 5 or 6 years of making pizza dough have I done an ‘overnighter’. That’s to say, made the dough the day before use. And when I have, it was during the early days when I hadn’t yet settled on a constant set of ingredients so apart from a bit more of a yeasty-bready taste, I didn’t notice much difference.
Fast forward to last week (or fast-backward?) and I had the misfortune to be up and about at 6.30am. This might not sound terrible but I’m a night owl and had gone to bed at about 2.30am. Anyway, knew I was firing up the pizza oven that evening so decided to make the dough early. I did the usual mix and left it to rise and knocked it back about every 2 hours until the evening. I then split it into 4 and covered them and left them while the oven heated up. After about an hour (this is the outdoor wood-burning oven I’m talking about here) it was time to stretch the dough and it really was much more elastic than normal. Much easier to work with, still managed a small tear (that’s torn it) but I wasn’t being careful.
Next time I’ll do as per the article I linked to about Franco Manca and try 20+ hours.
